The mobile phone has become a ubiquitous symbol of prosperity in many developing countries, but what is its true value to their economies? According to a study of the wireless markets in China, India, and the Philippines, the economic impact of all wireless activity on these countries is up to four times the value to the wireless operators alone. Much of this value appears to come from the productivity gains and economic surplus that wireless customers receive simply by using their mobile phones. These results should encourage regulators and operators to get mobile phones into more hands more quickly.

Most measures of mobile telephony’s value to developing markets focus on how much wireless operators contribute to a country’s GDP. Delving deeper, we determined¹ the contribution of both wireless operators and wireless-related companies, such as content providers and handset manufacturers, to the GDP of the three countries we studied. Auxiliary players, we found, contribute nearly as much to the GDP as do operators—in China’s case, twice as much (Exhibit 1). These numbers, however, exclude the benefits that mobile phones bring to their users—say, from saved time.